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Where a Suitcase Full of Cash Won’t Buy You Lunch
By GLORIA DAWSON JULY 30, 2016
Patrons of Sweetgreen are very particular about their
salads. When the company recently removed bacon and sriracha from the menu,
customers took to social media to complain. But after a handful of Sweetgreen
restaurants stopped accepting cash in January, barely anyone noticed, according
to the company’s owners.
Even Sweetgreen executives thought going cashless was “a
harebrained idea” at first, said Jonathan Neman, a co-founder and co-chief
executive of the company. “But we looked around and saw that airlines haven’t
been taking cash for a while.” At Sweetgreen’s locations throughout the United
States, cash purchases have declined to less than 10 percent today from 40
percent of all transactions when they opened their first location nine years
ago, he said. Sweetgreen now has 48 locations.
Although America is far from becoming a cashless society,
cash transactions are less frequent than even a few years …

Windows 10 upgrade: Don't use Express settings if you value
your privacyTake the time to customize typing, browsing, and other
settings from the get-go.

At the end of the Windows 10 installation, you could hit Express
Settings to finish up fast, but taking the time to customize could save you
some privacy. · Jared
Newman|@onejarednewman PCWorld

·Jul 29, 2016 8:19 AM When you’re setting up a new or
existing PC with Windows 10, Microsoft will offer to install the operating
system with "Express settings." Although Windows 10 Express
settings will get you up and running quickly, that convenience comes at a cost:
By skipping over custom settings, you’re agreeing to all kinds of data
collection and behavior tracking, much of which didn’t apply in earlier
versions of Windows. Here’s our advice: Instead of
blindly enabling Express settings in Windows 10, take some time to understand
what you’re agreeing to. Click theCustomize
settingslink (in
tiny text at the bottom of the setup screen…

Inside the Gigafactory: Tesla's most important project
The automaker needs this factory’s batteries to succeed.
Roberto Baldwin 1h ago in Transportation
A group of journalists sit in cars and a shuttle as a
guard checks to make sure every passenger is on his list. They're the security
guards for Tesla's biggest and most important endeavor, the Gigafactory. When
completed, it will occupy the equivalent of 107 football fields. The automaker
has invited us for a tour of the largest battery-manufacturing factory on the
planet.
To construct the enormous three-floor factory and meet
the goal of producing 400,000 pre-ordered Model 3s by the end of 2018, Tesla is
building the Gigafactory in phases. As a section is completed and equipment is
moved in while the next portion is being erected. It's not so much a single
building but a series of connected structures.
Section A is already cranking out battery packs for
Powerwalls. Sections B and C have battery cell manufacturing equ…

Friendly 'delivery robots' may be coming to Austin to
live and work
Austin may be getting a fleet of robots in the near
future. FOX 7's Casey Claiborne has more on what the robots will be doing.
By: Casey Claiborne
POSTED:JUL 27 2016 06:59PM EDT
UPDATED:JUL 28 2016 08:14AM EDT
The robots look like coolers on wheels and they don't
quite have names yet but the company is called Starship.
"Starship Technologies have created the world's
first commercially available autonomous delivery robot," said Starship's
Henry Harris-Burland.
Harris-Burland flew in from London to show Austin what
the robots can do.
"We came to Austin because it's common sense, it's
obvious. Austin is a very forward-thinking, tech-embracing, innovative
city," Harris-Burland said.
The company is hoping to come back and test them out
here.
They're looking at three different markets: package
delivery, grocery delivery and restaurant delivery. So these guys might sho…

Robots as good as human surgeons, study finds
By Laura Donnelly, health editor 27 JULY 2016 • 6:01AM
Surgery performed by robots is just as successful as
operations carried out by surgeons, a major trial has found.
The study of prostate cancer patients found those whose
gland was removed by a machine were doing as well after three months as those
who went under the knife in the traditional way.
They experienced less pain doing day to day activities a
week later, and reported better overall physical quality of life after six
weeks, but this levelled out over time.
Those undergoing robot surgery also lost far less blood
and spent less time in hospital.
There was no difference in urinary and sexual function,
or the number of complications, the research published in the Lancet found.
Robotic surgery has become increasingly common in the UK
over the last decade.
Most common is the da Vinci robot, a set of robotic arms
controlled by a human surgeon sitting a few feet away.
A high magnifi…

Facebook Fails to Show Up for Seventh Tax Summons From
IRS
By Aoife White July 27, 2016 — 3:50 AM PDT
Facebook Inc. officials failed to show up after getting
seven summonses from the Internal Revenue Service demanding internal corporate
records on one of its offshore tax strategies, according to an IRS court
filing.
U.S. authorities are examining Facebook’s federal income
tax liability for the period ending Dec. 31, 2010 and are looking at whether
the company understated the value of global rights for many of its intangible
assets outside the U.S. and Canada that it transferred to a subsidiary in
low-tax Ireland.
While Facebook has supplied some documents to the tax
authority, it hasn’t provided books, records, papers and other data demanded in
seven summonses, the IRS said in an amended petition filed Monday at the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California. These include a request
to show up at an IRS office in San Jose on June 29.
The documents sought "may be…

VIDEO: A one-armed Australian robot can build a house
four times quicker than a brickie
CHRIS PASH JUL 27, 2016, 1:25 PM
Fastbrick Robotics, an ASX-listed company based in Perth,
has created a robot brick layer, a form of 3D printing which can create the
shell of a house without being touched by human hands.
The Hadrian 105 robot, named after the Roman emperor who
built a wall in ancient Britain, has hit a bricklaying speed of 225 standard
brick equivalents per hour, or about half a day’s work for a top human
bricklayer.
To prove it, the company released a time lapse video,
showing the robot at work. Here’s the robot, doing everything with one arm,
laying over-sized bricks, following a laser guided system:
The demonstration was designed to ensure that all of the
complex characteristics of a brick house can be handled by the Hadrian 105
robot.
The vision at Fastbrick Robotics is to create a machine
which can complete the brickwork of a home in three days at lower cost with
higher q…

Superhuman Tech? Most Americans Fear the Worst
By Sara G. Miller, Staff Writer | July 26, 2016 10:00am
ET
A majority of Americans are worried about scientific
advances aimed at enhancing humans' natural abilities, according to a new
survey from the Pew Research Center.
In the survey, released today (July 26), researchers got
people's opinions on three emerging medical technologies: gene editing to
reduce a baby's risk of disease, brain chip implantations to make people
smarter, and synthetic blood to improve athletic performance. These
technologies are not available right now, but some researchers are moving
toward making these advancements a reality one day, according to the survey.
The survey included a nationally representative sample of
about 4,700 American adults. In addition, Pew held six small focus groups with
a total of 47 people to discuss the technologies and their potential
implications, and to learn more about people's opinions than could be gleaned
with …

Verizon Ends Yahoo Independence With $4.83 Billion Deal
By Brian Womack
July 25, 2016 — 4:36 AM PDT Updated on July 25, 2016 —
12:00 PM PDT
Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to buy Yahoo! Inc.’s
web assets for $4.83 billion, ending the company’s two-decade run as an
independent business that took it from Stanford University startup at the dawn
of the internet age to also-ran behind nimbler online rivals such as Google and
Facebook Inc.
Verizon will pay cash in a deal that includes Yahoo real
estate, but excludes some intellectual property, which will be sold separately.
Yahoo will be left with its stakes in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Yahoo
Japan Corp., with a combined market value of about $40 billion.
The telecommunications company will add Yahoo web
services that still draw 1 billion monthly users, including mail, news and
sports content and financial tools, gaining share in the $187 billion
digital-advertising market -- though it will nevertheless be a distant third
behind Go…

Google Sprints Ahead in AI Building Blocks, Leaving
Rivals Wary
By Jack Clark July 21, 2016 — 3:00 AM PDT
There’s a high-stakes race under way in Silicon Valley to
develop software that makes it easy to weave artificial intelligence technology
into almost everything, and Google has sprinted into the lead.
Google computer scientists including Jeff Dean and Greg
Corrado built software called TensorFlow, which simplifies the programming of
key systems that underpin artificial intelligence. That helps Google make its
products smarter and more responsive. It’s important for other companies too
because the software makes it dramatically easier to create computer programs
that learn and improve automatically. What’s more, Google gives it away.
But for some competitors, there’s a big downside to
adopting Google’s standard. Using TensorFlow will help Google recruit more AI
experts by training them on the same tool it uses internally, spotting their
code, and hiring the best contributors. It c…

Pepper robot gets new job selling insurance
8:48 pm, July 21, 2016
The Yomiuri Shimbun
A major life insurance company will deploy humanoid
robots nationwide this autumn, using them to wait on customers at its offices
and sending them out on sales calls.
Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Co. has announced plans to
deploy 100 Pepper robots, made by SoftBank Group Corp., at its 80 branches in
October. Pepper will explain insurance products and services, and accompany
sales people on their rounds.
This will give Meiji Yasuda the highest number of
humanoid robots deployed in the financial industry.
Pepper will explain comparatively simple, reasonably
priced insurance products in customer service areas at branch offices. The
robots also will attend to visitors at insurance seminars held by the company,
and accompany Meiji Yasuda salespeople on visits to other companies to promote
insurance products.
Heightened security arrangements have made it more
difficult to sell insurance to companies, and …